


New Horizon

by LadyMorgaine



Series: Mixed AUs [1]
Category: SEVENTEEN (Band), 방탄소년단 | Bangtan Boys | BTS
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, M/M, On Hiatus, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-25
Updated: 2020-04-01
Packaged: 2020-07-19 13:22:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 12,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19974763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyMorgaine/pseuds/LadyMorgaine
Summary: Kim Seokjin wakes up on a station drifting through space, with memories lost and no one else awake. He should not have been there, didn't know how he got into the stasis tube. Lost, he tries to cope before others wake up as well.





	1. Inner Reality

The station swam through the galactic shallows, quietly making its way to the planet marked as the target in its databanks, pushed on by the enormous hybrid engine at its heart. It used about ten percent of its power on the journey, and was purring along nicely according to the on-board automated diagnostics that bore its precious cargo like a wandering planet to their destination. Around it, protected by the best shielding Earth had been able to come up with, lay the immense databanks of the supercomputer, and beyond it the real bounty of the station.

Tens of thousands of people, all safely kept in stasis pods. All of them chosen by lottery, all of them the best of their fields. Beyond that ring, the gigantic laboratories that kept gene-sequenced samples and crops made resistant to everything Earth’s scientists could think of.

The station, simply named Earth-17, was supposed to be the last great hurrah – stations one through sixteen had perished at the hands of the Chohar Imperative, leading to the last and greatest build Earth could afford. The trajectories were checked for months, the choice of planet debated over for just as long. Staff received years of training as the station was built. Every last eventuality was catered for by minds trying to think the biggest and best thoughts. It would have succeeded too, if everyone had remembered that no plan survived first contact with the enemy.


	2. The Sleeper Awakens

The canopy of glass frosted over with breath as life support detected an imperative from the station-wide computer network to wake this inhabitant up. He lay in the first hexagon of the nine sleeper areas, tucked away in a back row. From the records they had on him in the databanks he was Kim Seokjin, male, Korean ethnicity, and one of the youngest curators the National Museum of Korea had allowed on its board.

His bio-data scrolled by, including a genetic print, before a short listing of hobbies and strengths scrolled by: good at organization and prioritizing, the eating blog that he had started that included historical foods in a new urban context, right down to his socio-economic status. The end of the file blinked red, displaying a glaring ‘Number mismatch’ in the space where his lottery results should have been.

The stasis tube flooded with heat and a richer blend of oxygen. Automated systems sprang to life pumping melting cryo-fluid from the ‘womb’ he drifted in, dressing him, making sure the elasticity of his skin had been preserved. It was his lips that moved first, quivering before they parted to inhale. His eyes followed next, long eyelashes giving a tremulous flick before a blink turned into opened eyes. Kim Seokjin stared up at the canopy over him, decorated with a fact readout, and did the only thing he could to escape the sudden influx of nightmares.

The canopy furled open as his limbs flicked up and out, battering misshapen hands pushing its leaves away so that he could sit up. He felt tired and hungry and confused, disembarking so gracelessly that he sloshed remaining bits of the fluid over the edge as he slopped out onto the metal floor, shivering at the cooler air outside. He remained there, covering against the island base of the stasis tube, shaking as his thoughts tried to make sense of what had happened.

The last thing he could remember was watching the way a stream of ruby liquid fell into a crystal glass; the rich, deep red winked at him, perspective skewing oddly.

_A benefit?_ His mind struggled to cope, to turn over into functional form.

He had laughed and watched the wine, and then an infinitesimally packed moment of utter darkness, and now this.

Jin risked a look up around him. He was in some kind of large hall shaped like a beehive, and it cost him more time than he wanted to admit to count the rows. If all of them were full like his, there was at least a thousand people sleeping in here, perhaps more. The thought horrified him. Panicking, he struggled upright and tried to walk, only to flail for stability against the tube next to him. There was a face there he didn’t know, a female. She seemed Korean as well, a little younger than him. Another. Another. All of them full, though in one he saw a man clearly in his eighties going by what the projection on his tube said.

He directed his gaze to the room again. “Hello?” he quavered, and laughed nervously to stop the tears and fear threatening. “Hello? Is anyone there?”

No one answered. His voice echoed oddly.

Grimacing, he tried to stand again, and found that he could hobble along in a fashion. His muscles pulled and twanged oddly, as if he didn’t traverse nearly three hundred thousand square metres at the museum on a daily basis. His joints felt odd too, but the oddness slowly went away as he kept at it. His hands tingled, fingers still not quite straight, but he ignored them to look around the room again.

Blink.

There was a yellow symbol on the floor, one he had never seen that reminded him somewhat of a documentary he had seen on African syllabaries. It wasn’t there the next moment, a brief existence that nevertheless affixed his interest in that direction. Slowly, then more quickly as his legs gained speed, he made for that avenue of the hexagonal shape.

As he crossed some arbitrary boundary a door cycled open in the midst of the avenue’s terminus in the wall. The mechanism reminded more of a web than anything else, but he could struggle through it into a corridor beyond, which he paused to appraise. It seemed made for humans, being about three metres in height, and very dim except for a patch he stood in front of. The walls had a thick strip at eye height that looked like touch screens, but they didn’t light up when he touched one hesitantly.

Looking first left, then right, he finally decided to go right. Trailing his hand down the wall, he wandered aimlessly, going by feel more than touch. Some sections of the ceiling glowed gently with recessed light as he approached, some didn’t. After what felt like an eternity on the freezing floors, he finally reached an intersection of some kind. Three corridors of equal size met, with the other two shooting off into darkness. Towards his right, like a section of honeycomb some lazy bee hadn’t quite finished, was a simple doorway.

It didn’t open at first, but the second time he slapped his hand against it in frustration it abruptly surged open a few inches, then shut, then open again, getting trapped somewhere along its track. He sweated like a pig to wrestle it open a few more inches until he could pass in, and halted on the other side so that he could gape.

The room was just as massive as the hall he had been in – precisely the same size, it seemed – but here it seemed like the inside of a computer. There were interfaces along the outside, with banks and banks of screens and chairs that looked meant for humans. That wasn’t what drew his attention.

In the middle of the room, in a massive column of some transparent material, a figure in a strange suit drifted. He had to walk closer to catch all the details, and his nose wrinkled at the acrid stench coming off what looked like a small leak. Bitter, but with a musky resinous undertone to it, like a cologne gone wrong.

The tube was lit from the top and the bottom, tinting the clear liquid a serene blue, but there were so many cables and so much hair floating around that he nearly couldn’t see the figure inside. It looked just a bit taller than him, almost anaemic in its slenderness, and it wasn’t until he walked around nearly a quarter of it before he could see a slice of the person inside, half-hidden by floating silvery-grey hair. A strong jaw and a high cheekbone, quite handsome if too thin, and the knobby serrations of spine being linked to what looked like a plug-suit.

Jin nearly hurled when his mind understood that the wires weren’t just attached to the suit the guy had on, but likely grew inside him, linking him to the massive structure that he couldn’t understand. The guy was pinned like a butterfly with a thousand needles holding him still, and the rare sections of body only made the scene sadder.

It took him a long time to see that the figure _was_ breathing, albeit what looked like the goo and not air, and even longer to track down a skyway on the back of the room, stretching out to what looked like an access port on the top ‘lid’. He made his way up and around, opening the simple manual lock by the same expedient of banging it with his fist until it was sore and the lock splintered open. Lifting the hatch, he gagged at the sudden smell of the liquid, thick with artificial smells and the worst case of body odour he had ever had the displeasure to be acquainted with.

He stopped just short of reaching inside, aware it wasn’t something that should be done, and closed the little hatch again, making his way back down. On the way down he investigated, but found little else as bizarrely fascinating as the man in the liquid. His fist was getting sore from banging on surfaces too, and his stomach roiled and churned with hunger.

“I’m sorry, I’ll come back,” he whispered softly, giving the tank a pat before he left in search of some food. The door closed shut behind him before the figure in the tank opened its eyes and stared at it, confusion and a vast tiredness apparently in the muddy brown eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   * There will be other characters too. They'll just wake up later on, it's meant to be an ongoing work, just with very slow updates, sorry! 
>   * This is far out from most stories these days, I hope someone'll find it interesting. 
> 



	3. Enter The Strange

The corridors appeared endless. There was little dirt visible as Jin trekked down the corridors in search of food and a bathroom. It felt like miles and miles of the same dreary gunmetal gray; he had started counting to see how many steps he gave to each side, but had lost count around three hundred, when his stomach growled and the ache in his right leg became just too much. He travelled hither and yon, led on by nothing at all, and tried to remember what had happened after that glass of wine.

One section, then two, sometimes interrupted by breaks against a wall, sometimes not. He had nothing but his sleepy memory to tell him he hadn’t been here before, but as he trudged the last bit to a distant join point, something zoomed out and made him trip over his own feet from sheer shock. He fell, cursing and skinning hands and knees, and lay groaning on the floor for a few moments to get his breath back. Slow seconds later, after he felt something bump against a hand, he pried one eyelid open.

It was a little thing that looked like a spider on legs, and he promptly screamed like a girl and flailed over and away, unwilling to become its alien breeding ground.

It whirred away a little distance to safety before whirring around on tiny little legs to come face to face with him.

“Go away,” he said feebly. “I’m not good to eat.”

A vast silence followed before the thing moved maybe a handspan away. Jin wasn’t positive, but it was staring at him judgementally as he tried to worm-inch away. Finally it rolled closer – oh sweet horrors – and bumped under his arm like a pet seeking shelter. It attempted to pick his arm up, complete with the sound of strained motors and whining bearings, before it was forced to put it down again.

Jin’s mind checked out. “At least feed me before you kill me,” he whined, trying to get up in a way that didn’t twinge at him. Everything twinged. It wasn’t graceful at all. He didn’t care. If he was going to die in a weird place with submerged guys and little spider assassins, he’d prefer going the easy way, surrounded by a mountain of pizza.

The little thing perked up as he did, stretching out a teeny-tiny arm servo to latch onto the fabric of Jin’s pants. It tugged again and again, then let go to scurry a little bit away. He wasn’t sure what matrix gave it life, but it was almost cute. Given that it was the only interesting thing in this _entire place_ he grumped and started to follow it, keeping to a pace he could muster. It was still slow, but somewhat surreal now – even if pinching didn’t wake him from the dream.

The tiny robot led him through two more sections before it stopped in front of a ‘sharp’ point, which disappeared as it scurried up the frame. The door opened onto another room as large as the computer room had been, but this one was filled with what looked like comfortable seating, with huge wall-panels around it. Jin stepped inside, not even screaming as the robot dropped down onto one shoulder, and suffered the indignity of being hair-pulled until it directed him over to a unit that lit up.

A red light shot out, scanning something in the weave of his suit.

“Good evening, Kim Seokjin-ssi,” a voice said, coming from the unit. “It is currently 23:15 station time; what would you like to eat?”

He boggled at the thing. “Is there a menu?” he finally asked weakly.

It promptly manifested a menu in English on a display for him; he watched with fascination as it changed over to Hangul. Plush lips pouting, he pulled out a tray and started ordering – slices of pizza, pasta, rice porridge, hotpot, kimbap, everything that he could before the unit beeped at him with a gentle ‘Caloric index exceeded, please return at next mealtime.’ Sniffing, taking the overflowing tray back to one of the seats, he tucked in as the thing on his arm scurried down. He played with it for a little, but was too hungry to pay much attention. When he had polished the tray clean, it carried away the empties for him.

Jin slanted slowly sideways, happy with the fullness of his stomach and the cozy sofa he was on, and was asleep too fast to say anything about the little spider thing settling on the curve of his hip. The thought of the guy in the tank was left for afterwards.

* * *

Some hours later – Jin wasn’t sure how many – he woke up with a raging need to pee. If it hadn’t been so urgent he might have enjoyed the charades with the little spider thing that he still had to name, but in the end it showed him where the nearest loo was hiding and he spent what felt like an eternity in sheer bliss. He scrubbed as much as he could, well aware he didn’t look his best, and made for the food unit again.

“You’re going to lead me back to him, okay?” he lectured the little thing that scurried up to his shoulder as he squeezed out every drop of food in the limit the unit had seen fit to give him. “I don’t know how to mime sleeping floating boy so you’re just going to have to understand now, right?” To his surprise a squeaky laugh tickled out of his belly at the strangely sober head-nod it gave him. “You just wanted to torture me earlier with the charades, right?” Another nod. “Figures.”

He felt vastly steadier on his legs and easily made the walk that seemed so distant to him yesterday. His feet were a little sore from the incessant metal he walked on, but he had surprisingly few aches beyond that. Entering the strange tube room with little fuss, he wandered right to the edge of the massive tube, put down his food and looked upwards to see as much of the face of the sleeping boy as he could.

Grimacing, he hunkered down on the floor. “I know you can understand,” he said to the many-limbed little robot that still hovered around him. “I’m going to need blankets and some kind of shoes, and a place to clean up. Do you have any friends that can help?” At the little thing’s up-and-down bob he grinned. “I think I’ll call you Gukmul,” he said softly, fingertip caressing the blunt metal body. “Is that okay, Gukmul? Gukkie for short, right?”

Gukkie leant slightly to the side, a habit he thought meant that the little robot was pensive, but it waited until it could lead Jin off anyway. As he exited the room, he came across a virtual army of Gukkies, some collaborating to carry a set of what looked like blankets, some whizzing along under the weight of pillows. Nodding with satisfaction – if he had to stay in a creepy place, at least he had his robot army – he made his way down the corridors, this time intent on trying to remember the route back.

Fifteen minutes later, after figuring out the strangest shower he had ever been in, he was in a fresh set of clothes, some socks and shoes, and finally feeling like a person again. Still, as he entered the room again he paused doubtfully: either the little robots had evolved some kind of romantic sentience, or their programmers had been awfully good at programming them: the pillows and blankets made a little nest at the foot of the tube on what looked like some kind of mattress padding, breakfast was set on a container doubling as a table, and they were all curled up neatly in some kind of super robot ball at the side.

“Thank you,” he said weakly. “Um, this is very well done.”

There was the sound of rushing water when he sat down and pressed his head to the tank. Not overwhelming, like the roar of an uncaring ocean, but soft, almost as if whatever kept the tank clean had a heartbeat rhythm to it. Jin wasn’t one for much introspection, but the faint susurrus of it muted his thoughts about escaping. He was warm from the blankets and had food, some tiny robots were trying to make his life better in the strange place and yes, he was probably the last human alive in this place no matter what all those stasis tubes said.

“You know,” he said to the boy in the water, “I didn’t exactly sign up for this. I didn’t even put in my name in the lottery so someone cheated you with me, I feel. And now I’m probably a million miles from home and I’m worried about my pets and my friends and Earth.”

The voice, when it came, was very soft and whispery, and rather deeper than he had expected a robot spiderling to be able to get. Weren’t most computer voices low alto anyway, to be comfortable on the ear?

“If we’re talking miles, we’re about one thousand, four hundred and one light years away from Earth,” it said softly. “That’s about eight and a quarter with fifteen zeroes after it. We’re very far away, sorry. Even with the engine at the heart of this craft, it’ll take a long time to turn around. They might be much older when you saw them again, relatively speaking.”

The voice sounded apologetic and it only increased Jin’s anxiety, until he wanted to cry and throw a tantrum and demand a do-over. Instead he sniffed, trying to get his lips to stop quivering and his shoulders in a comfortable position against the hard curve of the tank. “I shouldn’t have been here.”

“Nor should I, but we have about as much chance of getting away as a spontaneous wormhole opening up. At least I don’t have to worry about my thesis presentation now.”

The deprecating humour in the statement made Jin’s eyes open to stare down at Gukkie. It was one thing to believe a little robot could be programmed to make passengers feel at home, thus the mattresses and pillows, but shared life experiences? Something in his mind dinged. “I’m… not speaking to the little robot, am I?” he asked faintly, and felt horror rill over his shoulders as he fought not to look at the body floating in the water with all those pipes and things. It was a strange feeling, like knowing there was a monster behind you and being impelled to look anyway.

“No,” said the voice quietly. “The SCURRY isn’t sentient. I’ve been, um, using them because I didn’t want to frighten you.”

Kim Seokjin flinched away from the tube, considered all the factors for a single, queasy moment and passed out, dead unconscious, over his warming packet of soup.


	4. Chapter 4

When Jin woke up his face was out of the soup. He was stretched out on the mattress, clean and covered, buffered into a little hollow by pillows stacked around him. The last, nebulous wisps of a girl he had wanted to ask out still floated through his mind, slowly turning to mush as the reality of the situation intruded. His eyes pooled with tears at the subliminal hum of the engines translating through the mattress, at the thought that he’d never see friends or loved ones again.

“I am so sorry,” the soft voice said. “I didn’t mean to scare you that badly.”

He closed his eyes again to blink away tears and didn’t open them. “It wasn’t just you.” Oddly, he hated how stuffy his nose sounded, like he had cried in his sleep.

“Kim Seokjin-ssi.” So very gentle. “I am stuck in here. You don’t need to fear me. There is nothing I can do to you. Even if I had wanted to harm you somehow, the station’s core programming would prevent it.”

“But you’re the… you’re the core, right? I mean, I’ve seen sci-fi, you’re like the computer?” Jin fought his eyes open and sat up, broad shoulders hunched in the clean clothes. Something moved out of the corner of the eye and he fought his paranoia to look – the body was still where it was in the gel, it was just a fidget of one of the spiderlings. “There’s always an evil computer.”

The laugh that came was surprisingly high and joyful. “True. Humanity’s a little fanciful, isn’t it? But I think it’s like spiders? People attribute an alien sentience to them the same as computers. A sense of ‘other’ sticks to them, which sets them aside from the mainstream social norm and our concept of ‘self’. Indeed, Hegel said in his Phenomenology of Spirit that…”

“I don’t care,” Jin interrupted with a sulk, too irritated to submit easily to the stream of words. “They’re like cows. They stare and you can’t understand what’s behind their eyes. If you’re not an evil computer person, prove it. Get out of the tank and talk to me face to face.”

Silence fell, so felt-soft and stretched that it dawned that he had committed some kind of faux pas. “I… am sorry.”

“I can’t move,” the voice said, transitioning to bitter rather than sad. “There’s a nervous system block being applied to make sure that I remain still so that the interface lines up perfectly. I’ve been awake since the beginning. I can remember the things that put me in here, nightmares clad in reptilian flesh. Don’t you think I’ve tried to get out of here? I’m not saintly enough to be content to drift eternity away in here if I don’t have to.”

Jin swallowed. “What’s your name?”

“Kim Namjoon.” Sullen, meted.

Jin stood and cast the blankets aside to look at the figure in the tank straight on, fighting to see past the nightmarish cables and drifting hair. “Korean then. How old are you?”

“Twenty…four? I think?”

Jin nodded. “I’m twenty-six,” he announced stoutly. “Call me hyung. We’re getting you out of there.”

The first thing to go was the hair, which was an experience in and of itself. The aerated gel that Namjoon drifted in was impregnated with so many strange compounds it made Jin gag again to sink into the swirling tube, and holding his breath long enough to get to Namjoon’s skull through all the cables was an arduous task. He had a little re-breather that helped him to breathe, but feeling the gel close over his head and diving down into the aching, crystalline clarity of it was one of the weirdest experiences of his life. It made everything look strange, without the blur that got humanity through their lives.

He had to feel carefully for Namjoon’s skull. Snaking his hands through the mess of hoses with the small scissors Gukkie had rigged for him, he felt gently and carefully over the curve of it, crooked fingertips dancing around the electrodes. It was an absolute mess. Snips here and there started clearing hanks of hair from his view, all of which he balled up and handed to the spiderling waiting for it. He unveiled strong cheekbones, a razor-sharp jaw, a broad forehead. One long line of lashes fluttered against his palm as he tried to free a snarl of hair, and slowly lifted to expose a dark brown eye.

Seokjin smiled, it was all he could do around the re-breather, but he continued working and cutting and even just styling a little until Namjoon had a short aureole of hair around all the wires. He probed once, feeling at a wire entering Namjoon’s skin, but pulled it away at a pained flick of lash.

_How cruel,_ he thought. _How deliberately cruel, to reduce him to a set of eyes alone, even if he has the station at his mind’s fingertips._

An hour later, with the tank much clearer, he clambered out of it and back down to the ground, body curling and gagging at the fetid odour of the hair clumped in a gloopy ball, smelling of burnt acid and some other, dry musky scent he couldn’t identify but he hated. His fingers curled around the bowl Gukkie hastily carted over to him, but he didn’t hurl. It felt like a point of pride somehow. “You… your bones are almost as good as mine,” he managed to fight out, slowly tightening his core against the restless nausea. “You’d be quite handsome if you had some meat on your bones.”

“There’s a poem,” Namjoon’s gentle voice came, limned with an edge he could not interpret. “Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all. I thought my hope was dead, and I tried to let it go, and it’s awful hard not to see you as a bird right now. I don’t care about handsomeness, hyung. I’m just thankful I can see you clearly.”

Jin slowly won against the sourness in his stomach as he stripped off his tunic, tossing it in the bowl. He didn’t know what to say to Namjoon’s words because they felt too real, crisscrossing in his mind over the visual of his eye slowly opening and finally focusing on Jin. Instead, he gave an awkward windscreen wiper laugh and straightened. “I’m going to go and take a shower and get into fresh clothes again,” he decided. “In the mean time you better think how we can get those wires out of you. We’re not resting until you’re as free as we can make you.”

Namjoon laughed again. “Yes, hyung. I promise. Enjoy your shower. I’ll have the auto-chef make you some new food too.”

* * *

Weeks later, still no closer to the problem of getting Namjoon out of the tank, Seokjin had little patience left. Rather, whatever patience he had had disappeared like mist in the sun each morning he woke up on the floor of the computer core room, desperately swaddled in blankets with Gukkie shaking him awake because he had had nightmares again. Namjoon never said a word about them, never even breathed a hint that he might be disturbed by Seokjin screaming his head off at odd hours of the morning.

They had finangled him a bed on top of a long, wide crate. He had insisted on a little bedside lamp to make things a little homier, even if his sheets were whatever the spiderlings had stripped from the actual rooms he had never seen. He felt, if not entirely fond, at least not like that first miserable day, but he was learning very quickly that it was possible to go mad from the need for human touch. He was skin-mad, barely smothering it under the realisation that Namjoon had endured _years_ without turning into some kind of psycho.

Still, it had to change.

He looked up at the tube. The spiderlings had carefully cable-tied all the pipes together to unveil Namjoon’s way-too-skinny form a little more. It was one thing Seokjin loved, that he could face the tank squarely now, no longer reminded of many-tentacled things. Tilting his head, he caught brown eyes as they flowered open, smiling before he dropped his gaze and cleared his throat. “Do you know what this place has in common with a restaurant on the moon?” he asked, and let the expectant silence drag on.

“Was something wrong with the food this morning, hyung?” Namjoon asked. Expression wasn’t visible on his face, but the worry came out in his voice. “I can try something else…”

Jin cleared his throat again. “No,” he said lightly. “The food’s great, but it lacks atmosphere.” Laughter tickled out of his belly, pitched high into a stuttering giggle.

The silence scraped on as he laughed without end, caught between hilarity and a rising hysteria. Then, meted, Namjoon sighed. “That was the worst joke I’ve ever heart. I can’t even process how bad it is.”

Jin’s mirth folded. “And I can’t process how you are still in that tube? For god’s sake, we’ve got to get you out of there! Can’t you just go on… on… Wi-fi or something? LTE-A?”

“Hyung,” Namjoon tried, voice a little firmer. “It’s not that easy. Do you know how much bandwidth this takes? I have to make sure the station won’t suffer fatally. Beyond that I have to try and map where the connections go and I don’t have any scans of precisely where they implanted what and as much as I would like to get out of here, I don’t want to do it and just die.”

“Why can’t you scan yourself?” Seokjin demanded.

“Because it was never a function of this interface!” Namjoon snarled. “They didn’t care whether I would be able to get out or not, because they couldn’t care less about us except for their sick experiment! For all the Chohar cared, I could die in here and they’d just flush the corpse and bring in a new one! I can’t just magically whistle one up!”

Jin snorted, eyes narrowing. “The Chohar can go and take a flying hike. Humans built this station. There’s no way they wouldn’t have included a medbay with scanners and stuff, not when there’s all those people in stasis going to need medical help when they wake up. And doctors. There has to be a doctor on board.”

Namjoon sighed, voice gentling. “There might be a doctor. Unfortunately, everyone seems to be switched out from what I can tell, and there’s some random glitch waking people up, because I certainly didn’t wake you up and yet here you are. And yes, there’s a med-bay, but it’s over six hundred metres from here and the scanning unit would crush you if it fell on you.”

Reaching down to steady Gukkie, who was likely responding from Namjoon’s worry about him, Jin clamped his lips shut. “I’m going to have Gukkie show me to the med-bay,” he said evenly. “Rustle up some large cargo robots and get me a cutting plan. We’re getting that unit in here. I don’t care if I have to duct tape it to that tube, but we’re getting it here and you out.” He pressed his lips together and turned on his heel. It was atrocious manners, walking away from someone that couldn’t walk simply because you didn’t want to argue anymore, but he felt the need rill down his bones into his marrow, sublimating them into a need to cry.

Kim Namjoon needed to get out of that tank. The sooner, the better.


	5. Chapter 5

Jin regretted his flippancy when he saw the unit. It wasn’t as massive as he thought it would be but it was designed for a doctor’s use on a supine patient, so it curved oddly to fit over the sensor bed. The spiderlings are already crawling over it when he gets there, as if Namjoon doesn’t trust him with a sharp object…

…come to think of it, Namjoon probably doesn’t trust him with a sharp object. He’s been increasingly jittery these past few days.

He pinched his eyes shut and tried not to listen to the hollow thunk-thunk-thunk coming down the hallway. Instead he kneeled where Gukkie – by now differentiated by a shiny white carapace – is waiting for him, and takes the thing the spiderling holds up. It looked like a welding torch had a baby with an octopus.

“ _Hyung_.”

Namjoon’s voice stroked down his spine like silk, making him jerk.

“ _Hyung_ , calm down. I can hear your heartbeat spiking from here. You’re going to have to make these cuts precise. Just…”

“Tell me a story,” Jin interrupted. “Tell me a story about the first time you got drunk. Distract me.”

The silence weighed felt-thick for a second again. “It was when I was twelve,” Namjoon muttered, stilling at Jin’s giggle.

“I call bullshit.”

Namjoon’s voice returned, earnest. “No really, _hyung_. It was at a company party for executives and sponsors… you know the type?”

Jin sliced cleanly through the first projected line, stopping just short of chopping through the cable. It was remarkably like onions and learning how to dice them efficiently. “Yeah, been to a few of those.”

“Anyway, there were lots of overseas investors there as well and they tried to have an international menu so they served this kind of wine that you have pieces of fruit in it. Sangria, right? There were a few kids around and the food was _tiny_ and we were hungry so we ambushed one of the containers and ate the pieces of fruit from it as a snack. It was just fruit, right? We didn’t think it’d matter. Junho – he was the first one that passed out – went and stole a second pitcher for us. Of course we knew alcohol was wrong, but it was just _fruit._ ”

Seokjin’s shoulders shook from the desire to laugh, kept in only by a fierce bite into his lower lip. Another slice, one rounding the thick control stalk before Gukkie changed cylinders out for him, passing the empties along. “You got motherlessly drunk, didn’t you?”

Namjoon’s snort rippled through the air. “ _So_ drunk. I couldn’t get up for a day and after that I had my father shout at me and my mother lecture me about killing braincells. They decided to give me the talk just in case I was stupid about that as well, but the hangover was so bad I didn’t touch alcohol again for six years, until my first Masters’ party.”

Jin blinked, fluffed back his fringe and looked sideways at the diagram being projected, carefully reaching into the cut-open collar to unplug wires from the scanner bed in the order Gukkie projected. “Wait… your first master’s? At eighteen?”

“Well yes.” Namjoon sounded shifty. “I was a good student. It was my parents’ wish for me. They wanted an intellectual in the family and I didn’t mind.”

The wired connectors plinked, the bed went dark and something thudded into the medbay metedly, looming over Jin. Four arms came to support the column at the angle it sloped to, and Jin had that uneasy feeling about a monster looming behind him again. “Joonie,” he quavered, “Is there something big and scary behind me?”

“No,” Namjoon said immediately, reassuringly. “No _hyung_ , I’d never let the monsters near you, ok? It’s just one of the heavy lifters from the cargo bays. I… do you want to hear about the second time I got drunk?” He didn’t wait for Jin’s answer, just continued. “So I was eighteen and it was the first time I could really just let go. I had just gotten the good news and I rushed to tell my parents. They were over the top. My father actually pressed his card and a strip of condoms on me and told me to go out and get wasted.”

“Your parents are really odd,” Jin said as he bent to try and get the last little wire. “Gukkie? A hand here, please?”

Gukkie darted into the little space Jin cleared for him, extending one limb to finagle it from the socket. Behind him deck plating groaned as the lifter took the whole weight of the scanner, picking it up and over as he crawled out of the way. He had to fight to look at the lifter, the strange octopoid form of it – gods, was all the engineers fascinated with nature? It loomed above him, stretching out and cradling the truncated scanner arm easily. When had he started to get so scared of looming things? Why was he… why was he…

“ _Hyung_!” Namjoon called. “Calm down, _hyung_. Pinch your eyes closed and listen to my voice ok? It’s okay. I’m controlling it, I would never harm you, I promise.”

Jin crouched down, swallowing against the nausea, clinging to the gentle voice broadcast in the medbay; the tiny rational part of his mind wondered what the fuck was going on. The larger part just fought not to gibber. Something pressed what felt like a heat pack against his stomach and he curled around it, eyes

“So we went out, just a lot of the candidates, and I got drunk for the second time in my life!” Namjoon’s voice sounded urgently. “We went crawling around every bar in Gangnam that we could find, and then we crawled into Itaewon – I think I spent as much on Uber as I did on alcohol. And somewhere on the wrong side of three in the morning the latest bartender closed his bar and… and I went home with him because he was really hot, ok? And I thought I’d finally sleep with someone but I got so sick he just packed me up and told me to come back when I could hold my drink.”

Jin fought the tremors off, coiling fingers into the heat-pack until he could finally open his eyes. _Kim Seokjin is not like this! Get up to your feet, there are more important things to do…_ “Did your parents know you’re into boys as well?” he asked around a too-wet mouth as he stood, bracing one hip against the dead scanner bed. Measured against what he saw, it actually felt good when some of the spiderlings scrambled up him to rest on his shoulders; he was just mad enough to pretend they were fluffy puppies, or kittens, or something equally adorable.

Namjoon sounded amused when he answered. “They were still conservative enough that I didn’t tell them,” he said. “But I was onto my second masters and taking an accelerated PhD track soon after, so we didn’t see much of each other and they were just distantly proud. And then the spaceship came and scooped people up and I learnt that there are more horrible things than not having the ‘correct’ sexuality.”

“Did they get scooped up too?”

Namjoon opened the door for him as he tottered through. “No, but… but I did come across something when checking personnel records earlier and trying to work out whether any of our families are on board? I took that saliva sample from you?”

Jin’s stomach tightened again, this time with queasy hope. He puffed along the trail the boards on the wall gave him; seven lung-aching minutes later he was on what felt like the other side of the moon, looking down at a tube with a young-looking woman in it. She wasn’t young, he knew his mother’s age intimately, but she lay there looking as if she was fifteen years old, perfectly preserved by the stasis field that had faltered in his case.

“Her vitals are strong,” Namjoon assured him. “Do you want me to wake her up?”

Jin blinked through his tears, reaching to caress the lines of her face against the tube. “No,” he said, swallowing a huge knot down his throat. “No, I wouldn’t want her to worry. We’ll fix this, right? You said we’re barely another hop away from the planet, we can wake her up there. I wouldn’t want her to feel scared or alone right now.”

He inhaled and straightened, curving broad shoulders back. Seeing his mother there had made the situation so much more real. He didn’t have time to be afraid of looming shadows any longer. Marching back to the tube room, he tried not to pay too much attention to the two heavy lifters holding the scavenged scanner up and around the tube as Namjoon drifted there, seemingly oblivious. There was an entire host of little robots moving and adjusting and securing what seemed like an entire bed’s worth of little panels both outside and along the bottom of the tube both inside and out, veiling the man in swatches.

“It’s theoretically possible that I can get these out without too much effort,” Namjoon said, voice sounding distant in the room. “The actual tendrils. They’re bio-mechanoid, they can be programmed to degrade. The bandwidth is still an issue, but there is at least a period of twenty-four hours from the time the procedure begins to when a relayer starts functioning that I won’t be able to control the station. Most of the routines are on automatic, but I think you should have a little more sleep learning just to brush up on the finer points of…”

Jin frowned, interrupting. “Sleep learning?”

“Well, yes. In a stasis tube your body is in a still state, but the process is somewhat taxing on long-term memory and storage of it. Neural impulses can degenerate, so we have to stimulate them every so often. Some of the first volunteers that tested the concept could remember everything that happened to them before they went into the tank perfectly fine, but they lost years of childhood memories. Others could not remember what they had had that morning, or their own names. They had not found a way to combat that before the station was stolen, as it were, so to combat that I wake everyone up just a little bit once every hundred days or so – not enough for the body to age a lot. In that time, whilst they are just deeply asleep, I help them with dream learning.”

“What do you teach them?”

There was a moment of silence as the loaders shifted, then stabilised with little balancing struts, sinking into what looked like a final position. Jin was a little thankful that it somehow looked entirely human, not the uneasy melding of technology that reminded him too much of things in the deep. The spiderlings scattered away, clattering out of the tank, and Namjoon opened his eyes to stare at Jin.

“Whatever they’re interested in mostly,” he explained. “I have access to vast databanks. You were interested in art, so we did a little of that, and you always did like organising things so a little of that. Some are so receptive they dream vast narratives that connect across wakings, and others barely surface enough to reconnect the cognitive process. Sometimes the strangest things. You really liked cooking. There’s a guy that’s been studying martial arts like he wants to make his own form, and one that was a kindergarten teacher, I think, that wanted music lessons and is currently learning about archaeology techniques. Knowledge is freedom, _hyung_. I don’t proscribe what they should learn.”

It was such a Namjoon answer, at least as he was learning, that Jin’s mouth twitched a little into a smile. “You’ll have to give me the learning here. I’m not going to leave you again. I promised.”

Namjoon’s sigh rippled across the room, just a little warm and fond. “ _Hyung_ ,” he complained. “You like making my world difficult. But okay, at least I can get a stasis bed in here, it’s about time you had better than a mattress on a crate. We can start tonight?”

Jin wandered to the corner with his blankets and pillows that, somehow, the loaders had skirted around, not disturbing them much. He lay down in them, curling into his blankets. “We can start tonight,” he promised. For a moment he let silence descend. “Namjoonie,” he wondered quietly. “How long have you been twenty-four? If you’ve been awake since the beginning…”

Namjoon dimmed the lights slightly for him. “A long time,” he said truthfully. “My body could be taken care of by the machine, but my brain had to be awake for everything. I’ve been twenty-four for… a long, long time. But travel at near-lightspeed mixed with the Jumps messes up time as a concept. By internal clocks, we’ve been travelling for maybe three years now. I’ve always just considered myself twenty-four because that’s what my body is. Is that conceited, _hyung_?”

Jin turned over so that even with the blankets over his head he could see a slice of the bottom of the large tank. “Of all the people deserving a little conceit you’re not last in the queue.” He closed his eyes slowly; it had become Namjoon’s habit to have the spiderlings truly tuck him in, and he smiled when he felt it now. “Be kind to me in my dreams,” he whispered, and concentrated on succumbing to sleep.

That night Jin dreamt of technology, of the ways to keep it running; the overview of it, the _art_ of it. A soft, deep voice whispered through his dreams; make sense of the strange things he saw. It stayed with him, that voice, until it was as persistent as the warmest hug around his shoulders. It was a chin on his shoulders, lips just shy of his ear. Whispering, always whispering, and knowledge soaked into him like honey into a hive, golden-slow and sweet. He woke what felt like days later; when he sat up he was in one of the stasis tubes again, this one a spare moved to the core room, and wherever he looked the equipment had meaning behind it.

He slipped out from the stasis tube and caught his feet under him as he tried to step; one of the spiderlings scampered away. The tube had been covered up, but was still bulky and odd; the loaders supported the scanner and there was another bump there. Cables festooned it like an aureole of hair, some for power and some for what looked like blood and plasma and goo. It was so tightly shrouded he couldn’t catch a hint of Namjoon. Frowning, he wandered to the black sheeting, feet cold on the floor. “Namjoon-ah?” he questioned. “Are you still in there? Are you well?” Up close it stank even more acridly than normal, worrying him.

“Jin- _hyung_ ,” his voice came faintly, as if he was speaking from a great distance. “I’m still here, but we’re going to begin. I worked out a sub-dermal interface, it’ll take prolonged operation and it’s not the best thing to see. Please don’t look, ok?” He paused. “I’m leaving the station in your hands, _hyung_ , please look after everyone. Just for two days. Just for…”

His voice faded; the noise that came from behind the sheeting was very faint but jarring; Jin half-expected it to start pulsing like a diseased organ. He grimaced as he turned away, scooting defensively away to the closest level surface and sat down on it, prepared to wait as he tried to pray for success.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   * These are the last of the prepared chapters I have, so from here on out it'll be slow. 
> 



	6. Chapter 6

Two days passed. They were two horrible days for Jin; there were a thousand and one things to organise on the ship, from making sure that the schedules Namjoon had put down were followed, to making sure that the automated processes ran within tolerances. He was busier than he thought he’d be, and if it hadn’t been for Gukkie and its link to the ship’s database, he would have lost it. Instead his days were propped full of learning more about the station as he worked, from how to get the auto-chef to make different dishes to where they stored all the exercise equipment.

He found the databases to the computer core, located in hexagons on both sides of the engine, and dipped his head briefly into the massive geo-lab that was the counterpoint to the computer room. He stared at monolithic slabs of data crystal that held what seemed like the entirety of human knowledge, and he journeyed out one half-day to see the residential sections beyond all the sleepers, peeked into the bridge and just as quickly came out again: there was too much black on display, with only faint pinpricks of light to emulate the stars.

Two days and two nights: he had some tracking of how Namjoon’s operations were going, when the computer doctor had finally removed all the tendrils from him and kick-started his internal systems again, to when it implanted the interface he had designed subcutaneously. There had been video, nausea-worthy clips of someone floating with the entire back of their skull removed, and after that he had not eaten for an entire day. The only thing that kept him sane was the work and the countdown running on one of the screens in the computer room in bright teal letters.

He sat there at least an hour before, watching every second count down, ignoring the movement under the black sheeting as best he could.

“Jin- _hyung_.”

It was the same vocal depth but scratchy, a bit softer since it didn’t have the computer’s speakers to boost it, but his heart bloomed and he raced to sit upright and scoot around to the walkway. There, as one of the loaders hauled out the stinking, goo-drenched robot doctor, he saw a rail-thin figure desperately clinging to one of the loader’s struts and his eyes rounded. The figure coughed, spat out something goopy, and inhaled with difficulty.

A little taller than him, just a fraction, with silver hair clinging to his face in bedraggled locks. Namjoon blinked woozily and tried to step forward, but legs unaccustomed to his weight folded underneath him.

Jin rushed forward and threw his arms around Namjoon without second thought; he landed on his knees as well but with Namjoon’s goo-wet body pressed tightly against his.

There was someone with him, someone _touching_ him, and somehow all was right in the world again.

Namjoon’s face turned just a little to press into the column of his neck, breath hot and feverish against his collarbone. He coughed, throat sounding congested, but it was the most wonderful sound in the world to Jin. “It’s okay,” he whispered into the wet silver hair. “It’s okay. _Hyung_ is here,” he murmured, hand hauling the rake-thin body as close as possible. “You’re not alone anymore. Come on, let’s get you dry and dressed, let’s get you… let’s get you…”

“ _Hyung_ ,” Namjoon gritted out. “Don’t cry, okay? It’s all okay now.”

Jin’s lips pinched shut when he realised that tears were in fact racing over his cheeks, plopping against Namjoon’s goo-slick hair. The embarrassment was nothing against the heat in his heart, and slowly he managed to smile his first real smile in days.

* * *

Things went a little crazy after that, _Jin_ went a little crazy after that. He thought nothing of stepping into a shower to make sure that Namjoon remained upright, or feeding him bowls of thin gruel to get his stomach working again. He helped support him in the head, carefully washed his hair for him and in the ‘evenings’ he crept into the same bed as him in the nearest residential section, burrowing under the layer of blankets Namjoon’s too-thin body required to help keep heat in.

He woke up in the mornings, Namjoon curled around him and went to bed at nights, curling around Namjoon.

Slowly though, so slowly that he didn’t feel the pang of it, things became easier. Namjoon gained a little more flesh to his bones and they both hit the gym; artificial gravity was all fine and well but Jin didn’t want to be a wreck before his thirtieth birthday. When it came to time to carve faces into mountains, he wasn’t going to have saggy lines on his.

It was a delicate dance to get used to the feel of another person against him again, but they took it slowly. He was at Namjoon’s side as he tottered around the nine sleeper sections to look over the faces of people he could only view as statistics before. The man was mentally strong, immensely so, but hours upon hours of seeing faces in stasis broke even him. They were somewhere in the seventh, the section devoted to the arts, when Namjoon simply sank down next to one tube and cried for the first time in years.

Seokjin held him and did the only thing he could, card his fingers through shorter silver hair, stroking gently over the bump of the interface against his neck, and told him the worst dad jokes he could remember.

“Namjoonie,” he insisted a few moments later through the shuddering breath and tears against his clavicle. “Namjoonie, did you hear about the new graveyard they built?”

Namjoon didn’t respond past a shudder and a muffled grunt.

“Yes,” Jin continued on resolutely. “The old one was so overcrowded, people were dying to get in there…”

The noise that came suggested Namjoon wanted to die himself, but the clench of his hands on Jin’s shirt grew a little less.

“Your silver hair reminds me of a grandfather’s sometimes,” Jin said, feeling his shoulders tense against the surge of what was to come. “Does that mean when you go on a date you go to eHarmony?”

“Oh god, please stop,” Namjoon got out, voice thick. “I promise I’ll stop crying if you just stop with those jokes.” He pulled away a little, eyes brilliantly red-rimmed and skin very pale, “Your sense of humour is older than the Pyramids, _hyung_. Do you like torturing people?”

Jin sniffed and stood, pulling Namjoon up with ease. “I do it for my own amusement, I don’t concern myself with the entertainment of others.” He reached to wipe Namjoon’s cheeks with his thumbs, finger-combing the gossamer-light strands of hair into something approaching order. “There is something you need to understand,” he said terribly gently. “You are the reason these people are still alive. They might be angry that they got captured, they might even be angry with you, but it’s never, _never_ been your fault. You’ve been the guiding star of this station for over three years, Kim Namjoon. Don’t be sad, be glad.”

Namjoon stared down at him from the fractional difference in their heights and nodded, smile slowly spreading until his cheeks dimpled deeply. “Thank you, _hyung_. But I still say your sense of humour is scandalous.”

Shrugging, Jin turned to lead them out of the sleeper section. “I won’t think less of you for not understanding their grandeur,” he teased. “Come on, let’s go look at the next one.”

* * *

Days passed in which Jin grew stronger mentally and Namjoon physically; they were still sleeping in the same bed but not showering together, and Jin could live with that. Namjoon still had periods where he stared at nothing because an engine change had to be made, so Jin dove into the training he had received during that singularly awful two days. The station started to make sense underneath his hands as he got used to the ebb and flow of its cycles. It operated on a twenty-six hour day, not just because someone had decided to make days longer, but because that had been the predictions for the planet they were going towards.

That was, of course, before the Chohar had gotten their hands on things.

“Namjoon-ah,” he asked one day maybe a week on as he eyeballed a display with a list of civilians, professions and stats from the nine sleeper sections. “How do you know if a computer is lying to you?”

Namjoon’s shoulders stiffened, likely because he was expecting another bad joke. “Generally computers believe what their data tells them to believe,” he explained when no joke was uttered. “I’m sure there are some mismatches, given that you’re here and you’re awake and not who was supposed to be in that stasis tube, but short of going through them one-by-one to check up, we have no way of truly knowing.”

That irritated Jin. “Really?” he asked, dismayed. “That’s unfortunate…”

“I have their gene-prints,” Namjoon murmured, stepping close enough to sit down next to him. “So what I can do is at least give you a firm commitment on their sex and likely age. We’ll see if that whittles it down.” He paused. “I found something,” he said quite shyly. “I think you might like it.”

His voice had such a _boy-who-did-good_ air to it that Jin looked up with an arched eyebrow.

Namjoon took the tablet from him and tapped it. The graphs went away, showing what looked like a small room instead, or perhaps just made small by the view. It was very dark, and the video clip was quite short: one of Gukkie’s countless cousins clambered up and into a massive crate, skittering over to the view-port. Inside, as light shone on it, a small section of brilliant gold, with a crane’s head and pink-white clouds against a dark blue background.

Seokjin felt his heart kick in his chest as he looked at it, eyes slowly widening. “Are you shitting me?” he demanded, made coarse by the shock. “You have _Haehakbandodo_ down in the hold? You have storage? That was lost in the Pacific Disaster in 2108! What else do you have down there?”

“It’s the same problem as the sleepers,” Namjoon said slowly. “I know what’s supposed to be there, but this isn’t on any list that I’ve seen.” Almost unbidden, as if he required them as an _aide-memoire_ or a soother, he handed the tablet back to take Jin’s one hand, counting the slightly crooked fingers over and over. “I don’t know how it got there. I don’t even know what most of the stuff is, I’ve never had to study cultural history. It’s somewhere in the databanks, but they’re vast.”

Jin, watching him take a deep breath, curled his hands tighter around Namjoon’s fingers. “Tell me,” he insisted. “There’s something behind that sigh.”

“According to station diagnostics, there are six super-holds attached to the station,” Namjoon explained. “They’re supposed to be filled with supplies, food in stasis, raw minerals that can 3-D print equipment to get the colony started. I wouldn’t even have thought to check if we didn’t turn up mismatches in the sleepers. When I got the Scurries in there, three of them were filled with what I’d call cultural artifacts like this. Books, paintings, musical instruments, preserved petroglyph faces… one entire corner of one is the best representation of Earth’s fossil record that I’ve ever seen. Everything is carefully stasis-preserved. It makes me wonder what the Chohar were up to. How could they not only have taken us, but all these things? Why would they?”

Jin stared at him with rising horror. “What would they do with cultural properties in any case?” He bit his lip. “Is there enough food for the rest of the journey?”

“There’s enough, the food holds weren't touched, mostly the equipment holds,” Namjoon said. “The super-holds are massive, and I’ve set the station scoops to active. They’ll harvest stellar matter and rare isotopes too, we won’t run out. Our real wealth is in the manufactories on the station. I just wish I could remember what really… what really happened. I remember the Chohar, and I remember the journey here, but there’s a blank spot before it.”

“Namjoon-ah,” Jin questioned. “What exactly are we flying into, or away from?”

“That’s the question,” Namjoon murmured softly. “That’s the question we desperately need to answer.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   * The item Jin refers to, [Haehakbandodo](https://honolulumuseum.org/art/exhibitions/5139-rare_pair_imperial_korean_screens/), is a rare silk screen from the Joseon dynasty. In this AU it was presumed destroyed by the Pacific Disaster of 2018, a massive (and unexpected) earthquake that sank Hawaii, large parts of Japan, California and Alaska. 
>   * Why would an alien race care about Earth's cultural properties? 
>   * As a reminder, Jin was a museum director before he got scooped up. 
> 



	7. Chapter 7

Neck deep in pilfered museum-quality artifacts, Jin didn’t hear Namjoon call the first time; he was too busy teaching Gukkie how to carefully pull paintings out from boxes. He had only uncovered a tiny fraction of the super-hold so far, but his eyes had teared up as he uncovered what looked like the original Salvator Mundi from Leonardo da Vinci – it had gone missing from a famous Saudi prince’s collection late 2050 somewhere, if his memory served. Currently, using gloves pilfered from Medbay, he was checking what seemed to be one of the eight water-lily murals from Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris. He had seen these once upon a time, had stood there with tears in his eyes and now…

_And now…_

And now they were over fourteen hundred light-years from home on a station hurtling towards another world, and they still shone as brightly as normal.

As brightly as…

“ _Hyung!”_ Namjoon’s voice came again, this time much louder, and he became aware he had heard the first request but ignored it somehow.

Jin shook himself back to the present. “Namjoon-ah?” he said, voice cracking with emotion and dehydration and a mish-mash of other feelings. “Sorry, I… what is it?”

Namjoon’s sigh came through loud and clear and fond. “I _said_ that someone else had woken up. I’m hearing increased noise from the fifth sleeper bay, and the robot I left there is reporting movement. Can you meet me there? I’ll send one of the disks.”

Jin stilled, eyes wide and plush lips slowly parting to breathe in through the shock. “I thought you said I was just an anomaly… sure! I’ll come right away!” A ghostly chuckle sounded in the hold, and he grimaced at his own foolishness as he closed the crate again. He’d return later, store it properly…

The disks had been the most ingenious of the little discoveries Namjoon had made: a little less than a metre in radius, they had a simple railing and a personal anti-grav field, like a futuristic Segway. He clambered on and allowed it to whiz away at top speed, something that made his eyes sting. The first time he had been on one he had screamed around the corners and almost gotten ill; _that_ portion of the fast-travel devices didn’t lessen that he could tell.

He clambered off outside of the fifth sleeper-hold with trembling legs as Namjoon came close, supporting himself against the walls for a moment to get breathing back straight and silently cursed that he didn’t have a chip on his vagus nerve like Namjoon did.

“In here?” he asked, voice thick with rising excitement.

Namjoon darted a quick smile at him, cupped a hand over one shoulder for a moment before he nodded and led the way in. “Back ranks, section three, corridor two… ah! Over there!”

‘Over there’ turned out to be the sight of a young man trying to clamber out of the tube whilst getting ill; Seokjin couldn’t really tell his age as he rushed closer, but his skin felt young and smooth as he caught and lifted him, then held his head so that he didn’t choke in his own vomit.

“Stasis malfunction,” Namjoon whispered, sounding appalled as he knelt down next to Jin. “I’ve sent Gukkie and his comrades for a few things.”

Jin grimaced and nodded; the young man clung to him as he vomited over and over again, each surge emptying his stomach of precisely nothing. There were words and tears, all horribly mixed up, but slowly starting to make sense.

Namjoon blinked. “He’s speaking French. I… hang on.” Furrowing his brow, he leant a little closer to wipe the too-long fringe out of the guy’s face. “ _Qui êtes vous?_ ” he asked gingerly, voice throaty around the different intonation. “ _Pouvez-vous me dire comment vous vous appelez_?”

Jin stared. Something about the rough silken caress of Namjoon’s voice speaking French hit him strangely, made him concentrate on the halo of silky silver hair rather than the guy coughing and vomiting in his arms. Only for a moment, but it pinched at him, tickling something deep inside twisted around the memory of a glass of ruby wine, of laughter, of something that didn’t quite want to materialise as a memory. He swallowed and shook his head, concentrating back on the situation.

“ _Mon nom… est Joshua_ ,” the man coughed, slowly calming, though he was still a mess of tears and leaking nose and sick. “ _Hong Jisoo. Où suis-je?_ ”

Namjoon’s smile canted slightly, became less reassuring, more curious. “Hong Jisoo? Are you Korean? You’re on board a spaceship, there was a malfunction in the stasis. Jin- _hyung_ , can you hold him up a little bit better?”

Jin complied, hitched him up so that the guy’s head lolled against his shoulder. Out of the corner of his eye Gukkie and the other hordes of spiderlings rushed in, carrying towels, blankets and what looked like a med-scanner. “Namjoon-ah,” he murmured. “Do you have a bigger disk? His legs aren’t going to carry him.” As he spoke, he took the first towel, tossed it over the pool of vomit and took another to dab at Jisoo’s face.

When Jisoo spoke, his voice sounded less hoarse, but more rigid, Korean rusty. “I am,” he managed. “What spaceship? I didn’t win the lottery, I didn’t even enter!”

Jin grimaced and reached for a bottle of water, feeding him little sips.

A klaxon sounded before Jin could answer, though Namjoon shut it off seconds later, bolting to his feet with a whispered curse in some liquid-sounding language. “I’ll be back!” he yelled over his shoulder. “I’ll send that disk!”

Jisoo pinched his eyes shut. “What’s going on?” he got out between sips of water. “What… how…”

“Shh,” Jin shushed. “I’ll explain, I promise. I’ll explain it all.”

* * *

Namjoon’s breath raced as he sped the last kilo towards the first sleeper bay. The alarm had sounded, then died almost immediately. He was half-afraid of what he would find, and the fear ratcheted up his heartbeat in a stress-response that he did _not_ appreciate. Of all the things he loved about being ambulatory again, being prey to this kind of hormonal response wasn’t his favourite.

He thundered into the first sleeper bay and barely had time to recognise that somehow the robot he left had a broken-off shard of metal in through its brainstem before something grabbed him. Gravity went awry as he spun in someone’s hold, coming down on his back with an almighty thud. There were hands on his neck, choking him with fantastic strength. His eyesight dimmed as he panicked, painting haloes around the young man’s face: strong chin, messed-up hair, very light skin and red lips. A Neo-Classic Cinderella, one that was choking the shit out of him.

Struggling, he raised his hands to the wrists near his throat, patting them frantically as he tried to avoid blows to the back of his head. Words gurgled out, the station was coming alive around him in rage and fierce protectiveness, and he couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t _breathe…_

“Shit!”

The curse sound panicked and the terrifyingly strong hands around his throat vanished, turned gentle. They patted at his cheeks with increased fervour, one slipping around to cup his nape as only Seokjin’s had done so far.

“Fucking motherfucker fucking fuck fuck!” the guy above him cursed even as he faintly heard footsteps clatter closer. His perception of time spun away from him, mixed with faint appreciation. The guy cursed like he was a rapper on a B-side diss track, not to mention…

He faded for the first time, only coming back to as his ears registered Seokjin’s way-too-loud shouting.

“What the hell were you doing, choking him? Oh my god, if you’ve damaged the implant…!”

“I’m sorry I woke up thinking this was an Aliens rerun and he was a monster!” the unknown man shouted back. “There was a machine leaning over my stasis sleeve and I panicked!”

_Totally understandable,_ Namjoon wanted to croak out. _I’m still panicking right now._ He wondered faintly if the implant had in fact been damaged, and how he would repair it if it was. _Two more days of floating with my skull off? No thanks…_

Gentle hands cradled him, wrapping around his thin body and picked him up. There came the scent of Jin’s skin with soap, with just the faintest undertone of vomit, and then he went away again, only to wake up with the sounds of a medbay around him. It smelled sterile too, but this time when he blinked his eyes cleared and he could take a deep breath. He did, shuddering, and turned his head to focus on the tiny, stifled sob that came from his bedside.

_Jin_. He looked horrible with his way-too-handsome face pulled into a rictus of worry, full lips pouting.

“Hey,” he managed to croak out, fingers flexing around Jin’s hand. “Um, what happened?”

Jin exhaled raggedly again before his glance shifted tellingly. Namjoon looked too, at a young man with porcelain skin and fierce eyebrows, a jaw that could cut metal and hangdog eyes.

The guy took a deep breath. “I happened, Namjoon-ssi,” he muttered, cheeks blotchy with embarrassment and eyes red. “I’m sorry, I woke from a nightmare and everything was funny in front of me. I was just trying to get away. I’m Choi Seungcheol.”

“You curse really well,” Namjoon said apropos of nothing, weathering Jin’s sniff of derision with gratitude. “Really, really well.”

Jin sniffed again. “When he choked you, it damaged some of the nerve strands that connects your implant to your medulla oblongata and your spinal column. Your breathing was going haywire and the station was panicking, and…”

Namjoon squeezed his fingers with all the strength he had.

Jin took in a deep, shuddering breath. “ _Luckily_ Choi-ssi is a firefighter, so he had paramedic training. He kept you breathing until we got here.”

“Really,” Namjoon murmured woozily. “Rose Red has paramedic training?”

The guy blinked and leant closer. “I’m Choi Seungcheol,” he said carefully. “Not Rose Red, whoever that is. I really am sorry, again.”

Namjoon sat up with creaking joints, weak abdominals fighting to straighten him. He shook his head, reconsidered it when something twinged, and winced as the robotic doctor promptly needled him with something. Seconds later, feeling the ghostly pain float away, he breathed out a shuddering breath. “What about the other one? Hong Jisoo? Is he alright?”

Jin nodded as he straightened, stepping to the side to clear the view. Beyond him, supine on a second bed, Jisoo was a still stretch of body and skin with too much pallor. Namjoon’s eyes flicked over the worrying picture he presented, from the rake-thin legs to the sunken planes of his face. He stepped off slowly, fighting the shock to his ankles, and clung to Jin as he traversed the short distance to scan Jisoo’s vitals.

Seungcheol stepped easily around the bio-bed, coming up on his other side. “Seokjin-ssi tells me that he had a bad reaction to stasis,” he muttered. “I didn’t know what to do, so I just got him hooked up to the bed. If he’s more than fifty kilos it’s a lot. In fact…”

Namjoon glanced to Jin, saw the worried furl of his mouth before he looked away to Seungcheol. “Some muscle loss is inevitable,” he explained. “But this is too much. Even when I was connected to the station more directly, I didn’t sense this.”

“And we still have to find out why they woke up,” Jin murmured at his side. “Jisoo-ssi I can understand, if the station’s safeties tossed him out of stasis before he could be permanently damaged, but that does not explain Seungcheol-ssi and his suspiciously sturdy build.”

“Not that sturdy,” Seungcheol muttered, ears reddening slowly. “I mean, I worked out a little before, but…” He sighed plaintively. “Look, can someone please explain what’s going on? Is this some kind of elaborate hoax? Candid camera? I have an exam tomorrow, it’s kind of important…”

Namjoon looked at him, looked at Jin and finally sighed. “Seungcheol-ssi… I think we’ll need to sit down for this conversation.”

* * *

The conversation waited for a day, enough time for the repairs to the bio-mechanical strands to hold. Namjoon felt marginally better as he sank down on one of the couches in the lounge, though he creaked still and had to submit to the indignity of a blanket before Jin would stop fussing around him.

Jin.

It felt different now somehow, with a third person around. Namjoon distantly remembered the concepts of embarrassment and societal norms, and they left a bad taste in his mouth as his mind wallowed in all the ways he’d not be allowed to touch Jin anymore. Two people awake had been a little family. Three-and-a-half – Jisoo-ssi was still ill and unconscious in medbay – was a collective of conditioning that seemed to remind Jin that there was still a line to be drawn in some imaginary sand. Pity too, since his friend’s wide shoulders were comfortable to lean against and draw warmth from.

Choi Seungcheol listened with the deliberate, blank concentration of the terrifyingly physical, totally focused on them as they took turns to explain.

“So… we’re on a spaceship that’s hurtling through space towards a planet that you hope to restart humanity on,” he said carefully in the end. “And we can’t somehow stop this thing and turn around.”

Little tendrils of pain wormed through Namjoon’s mind at the thought of turning the station around. “You’re… a firefighter, Seungcheol-ssi?” he asked carefully. “I can’t trust what the data said about you, but that's what you mentioned?”

“Fire chief,” Seungcheol said easily. “But I was in the military before that.”

“Doing what?” Jin asked from the side. “You’re young still! Younger than me, I think, and I hadn’t even gone yet. The machine thought very early in your twenties.”

Seungcheol merely smiled at that, lifting one shoulder. “It was something to do, _hyung_ – if I might call you two _hyung_ then? The last I can remember is my twenty-third birthday.”

Jin gave a disbelieving laugh, face turning away as if the thought of that level of youth offended him somehow.

Namjoon hastened to fill the gap. “Jin- _hyung_ is twenty-six, near as we can tell, and I’m twenty-four. Feel free to call us what you like. To answer your question, it’s very much like turning a bullet around. We’re going at an appreciable portion of the speed of light as I understand it, and if we don’t go faster still, we won’t reach the nominal threshold for the Diaspora engine to initiate superluminary jump. Even if we could, by the time we got back home there’d be no one alive that you knew.” He paused and considered the look on Seungcheol’s face. “I’m sorry. It’s confusing for us too.”

Seungcheol reached up to scrub at his face, fingers fluffing through the shower-wet strands straggling over his forehead. “Fuck,” he muttered into his palms. “What a mess. _Fuck_.” He peeked at them between his fingers, looking oddly cute for a moment. “Is this some sort of candid camera thing? This is too much to believe. Am I high right now? This can't be true!”

“No, I promise…” Namjoon started.

Jin’s jaw rippled as he stood abruptly, cutting the conversation off. “Let's just cut through all this from the start. Come on,” he ordered Seungcheol. “I think there’s something that you need to see. Namjoonie, I’ll be right back. Stay here and rest. Don’t think too hard, okay? And don’t follow us.”

Blinking, Namjoon watched as Rose Red frowned and stood to trail after Jin. As the door hissed shut behind them, he slowly let his head fall back towards the couch, grimacing at the growing headache. He tried very hard not to think of them, and so it was more than a half-hour before the door swished open again. Jin entered first, expression set and eyes dark with some kind of fear; behind him Choi Seungcheol looked uneven and sick beneath his porcelain skin.

“I believe you,” he said very quietly, voice apologetic. “I’m sorry, Namjoon- _ssi_. I believe you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   * [Salvator Mundi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvator_Mundi_\(Leonardo\)) is one of a rare number of paintings by [Leondardo da Vinci](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci), and of priceless historical importance. 
>   * _Nymphéas_ or [Water Lilies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_Lilies_\(Monet_series\)) refers to the series by Monet, particularly one of the eight hanging in the [Musée de l'Orangerie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mus%C3%A9e_de_l%27Orangerie) in Paris. 
>   * I've no idea whether this French is accurately translated, sorry. If any native French speakers care to correct me, he was trying to be polite. 
>   * [Rose Red](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow-White_and_Rose-Red) is a reference to Seungcheol's colouring, but Namjoon's getting his Brothers Grimm tales confused. In any case, it's a reference to Choi Seungcheol's looks of black hair, red lips and pale skin. 
>   * Unless you're thinking easy sci-fi, vehicles in space spend as much of their time slowing down as speeding up. You can't just stop on a dime. 
>   * Korean men have to go to the military forces around age 28, I believe, and most put it off until then. In any case, Seungcheol is very young for a [fire chief](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_chief) position. 
> 



End file.
